The Supreme Court decision on student debt disappointed me. Still, I hung my flag on the 4th.

America is changing faster than most people realize, and it has little to do with advancements in artificial intelligence. It’s human behavior that has me more worried.

People have become so divided in this country that some historians are comparing today’s antipathy to the politically inspired anger felt by many Americans just before the Civil War.

One small sign of that is how some people celebrated — or didn’t celebrate — the Fourth of July. There were plenty of large, public observances, parades, concerts, fireworks displays, and picnics. Post-COVID revelers didn’t mind joining crowds to find some good barbecue and maybe grab a beer. But the appearance of my neighborhood this Independence Day gave me pause.

When we moved from South Jersey to a town south of Houston five years ago, at least a quarter of the 80 homes in our neighborhood put out a flag or some yard decoration for the Fourth of July. This year, there were only two, mine being one of them.

I couldn’t help linking the absence of flags to the same political rhetoric that is breaking apart families, friendships, and now neighborhoods.

That rhetoric has right-wing zealots claiming the flag is theirs and liberal opponents saying, “You can have it.” I admit hesitating to decorate two tree islands in our front yard with six small flags, fearing some neighbors might label me a Trump supporter. I’m not. But I am someone who believes neither the flag nor any other symbol of a unified nation should be so easily hijacked by exploiters seeking political gain.

Holding tight to both our symbolic and literal common bonds as Americans is especially important in the aftermath of recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions that have many of us feeling anything but patriotic. As if the court’s abortion rights and affirmative action decisions weren’t bad enough, it piled on by invalidating President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program.

My two adult children are among the 43 million Americans who owe nearly $1.75 trillion in student loan debt, so yes, I supported the forgiveness plan. But not just for them.

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Such a program would benefit the nation as a whole. Less debt would allow families to contribute more to the economy by paying their bills on time, perhaps buying a home, maybe even setting money aside for their own children’s education.

Individual borrowers currently owe an average of $28,950 in student loan debt. (Pennsylvania’s average of $39,375 makes it one of the states carrying the highest debt.) The Biden program would have provided up to $20,000 in debt relief for people earning less than $125,000 per year. But the court’s decision has put in limbo the already approved applications of millions of debtors, including 493,000 people in New Jersey and 743,000 in Pennsylvania.

A student loan relief program would be particularly helpful to Black debtors. Due to their typically lower incomes, Black students tend to borrow more than their white peers to go to college and take longer to pay off their loans. Only a quarter of Black borrowers had paid off their student loan debt after 20 years compared with 50% of their white peers, according to a 2019 Brandeis University study.

Biden has already announced a new program to provide student loan relief that he believes can withstand another court challenge, but the prospects for success are slim. I wish someone could also order colleges to reduce their costs, which are at the root of the huge debts students owe.

I graduated from a small, private, liberal arts college in Kansas in 1975, owing only about $4,000 to what is now called the Federal Perkins Loan Program. But my tuition was never more than $1,600 during each of my four years at Baker University. Tuition there now is more than $30,000, which isn’t a surprise; tuition and fees at private universities rose 134% between 2002 and 2022, according to a U.S. News survey. Reduce the cost of college and fewer students will need to take out loans.

My tuition was never more than $1,600.

Congress should be motivated to pass legislation to reduce student debt that could withstand the court’s scrutiny. Instead, partisan naysayers continue to sow seeds of division. “The Biden Administration’s election-year stunt to force working class folks to pay off the debt of wealthy graduates is both indefensible and nonsensical,” Republican Sen. John Cornyn said last year of Biden’s student debt plan. And he’s the “moderate” Texas senator.

Remember when Republicans were the ones accusing Democrats of waging class warfare? Today’s GOP instead tries to rake in more blue-collar voters by wrongly portraying student loan forgiveness as a gift to the elite. Where was that concern in 2017 when Republican legislation chopped the tax bills of the richest Americans by billions of dollars? The children of these millionaires don’t worry about how to pay for college.

It’s time to put aside hot rhetoric that only pits Americans against each other for political advantage without regard to the damage that is doing to this country’s spirit. I believe that seeking student debt relief would be a good place for Congress to help restore this nation’s sense of community. Done right, such a program would help millions of Americans coping with the economic realities of life in the 21st century.

The need for that is something I think we can all agree on.

Harold Jackson spent two decades at The Inquirer and served as editorial page editor from 2007 to 2017. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1991 and retired from the Houston Chronicle in 2020.